Most civilians got the General VK Singh issue six weeks to Sunday. In all the arbitrary brouhaha about how men in uniform should behave much of what is actually happening is being obscured. All the sermons and soda water being piously flung at the General by sanctimonious folks all across Indian media including an article on Governance Now [Gen ‘AK Hangal’ grows fangs, writes directly to PM now], might make him a wee bit wet but it still does not change the fact that Singh has not yet done anything wrong. Except tell it like it is.

It is very easy to stand on the sidelines and make cooing comments about timing and stringing a pearly necklace of ‘whys’ but there is no one in a command position who hasn’t hesitated to start an action that could raise a stink. Imagine being allegedly approached by a three-star General who offers a bribe for vehicles made in a government organisation. You don’t know who is using that three-star officer as a conduit. It is a very dicey situation. You call in your Director, Military Intelligence, and a couple of other principal staff officers, probably the quarter master general (all three-star Generals themselves) and you share this incident with them.

Conclusion: the said officer has been sent on a mission from someone up there.

Action: Stall. Take it back upstairs and run it up the flagpole, see who salutes it.

You sure, Gentlemen.

Yessir, pretty sure, he would not have dare come in otherwise, he obviously has a mandate.

So, the General flag cars his way to the defence minister and shares the sordid incident with him.

Leave it with me, says Antony, because the ball has come back…bounce, bounce, bounce and he doesn’t know who kicked it.

Sir, says the General and goes back to AHQ.

Now, a year passes and the General is raked through the mud over his age and ridiculed for no reason at all. Some mumbo jumbo occurs and General Singh is now seen as a spoilt brat. Largely because all Indians have this hypocritical and utterly absurd belief that men in uniform should be measured by a different standard, one to which they themselves need not aspire. The above-mentioned diatribe in Governance Now reeks of the stuff. “It is okay for a junior, but not for the army chief.”

Then we get this inane remark that he shames the chair that Sam Maneckshaw sat on. What is the connection? Sam Maneckshaw was not perfect. He was the man on the mat in a court of inquiry in 1961 instigated by Lt Gen BM Kaul based on complaints made by student officers in Wellington, Nilgiris at the Defence Services Staff College. If Kaul had got his way and posted Sam as an area commander, Sam would not have ever been promoted. Kaul messed it up for himself by making it all a personal vendetta. Not only that but when he was chief Sam was reprimanded by Air Chief Marshal P.C. Lal on December 15, 1971 for trying to usurp the air force authority to bombard the 93,000 soldiers under Pakistan’s Major General Rao Farman Ali in Dacca.

Argument: Don’t belittle one man who is the incumbent by making his predecessor into a saint. It is populist, it is a cheap shot and it smacks of ignorance.

Stick to the facts.

One, General VK Singh has informed the government of India that the army is ill equipped. That is scary.

Two, General VK Singh has informed the government of India that the army is ill equipped. That is now a global truth. So much for gloating enemies.

Three, General VK Singh has informed the government of India that the army is ill equipped. And no one has done a thing about it. That is mind-blowing frightening.

If the air force chief and the naval chief echoed the same sentiment and they sure can make a case each and a powerful one, India would be in a real pickle.

And our government would get away from bringing India full circle from 1962 when Indian troops dressed in T-shirts and carrying rusty .303 rifles took on the Chinese in Aksai Chin... because no one seems to grasp the singular import of what has been disclosed.

Where do you people live that you trivialise the most dramatic revelation for the country in this century by comparing a four-star General to a film actor and thinking you are showing respect. And moaning in the present righteous manner one sees about how he should have conducted himself in specific circumstances.

You should worry about the content, not the wrapping it arrived in.

Maybe, just maybe, the country deserves a second rate, badly armed force so that when the enemy is at the gate, you can fall upon your knees and pray to the gods to save your sorry little asses because those guns won’t work…